Trying to keep everyone safe
After more than a year, the World Poker Tour will soon return to live poker action in Las Vegas. This week, the WPT announced the Season XVIII WPT Venetian, to be held at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas March 5-9, 2021. This will be just the second run for this event; it debuted in March 2019.
Arguably the most impressive live poker tournament in the US, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) is an annual event that comprises of more than 60 tournaments. Held between the end of May and the start of July, the mega festival is one of the top USA poker tournaments for a number of reasons. Bravo Poker Live is the world's most convenient, secure and low cost poker event registration portal on the web. More than just a booking site, Bravo Poker Live communicates directly with our industry leading poker room management system installed in leading casinos across the world - giving you registration access like never before! Tournament / event Country Starts Ends Buy-in Fee; Le Dragon 500 Imperial Club Paris, Paris, FRA 2020-10-04: 2021-02-08: EURNo Limit Hold'em - Le Dragon 500: 2021-02-07: € 500: € 50.
Though the COVID-19 vaccine is slowly rolling out around the United States, the country will still be in the middle of the pandemic come March. As such, The Venetian will still be implementing health and safety protocols to prevent the spread of the virus. Among other precautions, casino staff will sanitize the chips, cards, and plexiglass dividers at the tables frequently. The state of Nevada also requires all people in the casino and the poker room to wear protective face coverings.
deliver the great poker experience our players have come to expect”
“We strive to provide our players with as many options as possible and have been working throughout the last year to deliver the great poker experience our players have come to expect, but in a Venetian Clean way,” said The Venetian’s tournament director Tommy LaRosa.
WPT Main Tour and WPTDeepStacks
As is typical of Main Tour events, WPT Venetian will have a $5,000 buy-in, though the World Poker Tour has yet to specify if the tournament will allow re-entries. The debut event in 2019 did have unlimited re-entries until the start of Level 11, the end of the late registration period, so the 2021 version will probably have them, as well. The event will also have a $1.5m guaranteed prize pool.
Though WPT Venetian will be the first Main Tour event to be held live in Las Vegas since the pandemic began, it will not be the first pandemic World Poker Tour tournament at The Venetian, overall. That honor goes to WPTDeepStacks, which will begin January 18, 2021. The $1,600 Main Event will run January 29-February 1 and will have a $500,000 guarantee.
The first Main Tour event to return live outside of Las Vegas will be the WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood January 22-26.
The year of the online event
The last World Poker Tour event on the Main Tour to run as scheduled was the WPT Rolling Thunder at the Thunder Valley Casino Resort outside of Sacramento, California in early March. Shortly thereafter, casinos began closing as the country started to realize the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and poker tours postponed and canceled events.
Since then, the World Poker Tour has held a number of large tournament series online on partypoker, including the WPT World Championship for players around the world and the WPT Online Poker Open in New Jersey.
The most notable live tour-turned-online has been the World Series of Poker. This summer, it held the 2020 WSOP Online on both WSOP.com and GGPoker. This weekend will be the conclusion to what is considered the official 2020 World Series of Poker Main Event, as International Bracket winner Damian Salas will face US Bracket winner Joseph Hebert heads-up for the bracelet and an additional $1m.
The coronavirus outbreak led to an abrupt halt of live tournament poker action in March of 2020. While the global poker circuit effectively ceased all operations over the course of just a few days, the return of tournament action is likely to be much more gradual.
The first major poker room in the world to reopen its doors was the King’s Casino Rozvadov, which is one of the largest rooms in Europe. It resumed operations on May 11, nearly two months after it first announced a temporary closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cards were in the air in Rozvadov for two weeks before the venue hosted their first live tournament series, called The Big Week, which ran from May 25 – 31. The venue has continued to offer a selection of smaller daily tournaments and short series since resuming tournament action in late May.
Stateside, a number of poker rooms also resumed operations with only cash games available at first. Casinos in Florida began reopening in late May, including Derby Lane in St. Petersburg, the Seminole Hard Rock Tampa, and bestbet Jacksonville and bestbet Orange Park.
The Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood, which resumed operations on June 12, recently announced that they would resume spreading select daily tournaments on June 23, after having first reopened on May 21. Derby Lane resumed spreading tournament events on June 6. Both venues currently include a maximum number of participants for their events.
“We are going to start offering tournaments again in July,” bestbet Director of Poker Jesse Hollander told Card Player. “We will likely have three tournaments a week in Jacksonville and two a week at Orange Park, no-limit hold’em tournaments with buy-ins of $60 and $150. We will offer those in July, and hopefully will offer more starting in August.”
The Las Vegas strip reopened on June 4, and with it three poker rooms resumed operations: The Venetian Poker Room (pictured above before the outbreak), the Orleans Poker Room and the South Point Poker Room. The Golden Nugget followed suit a couple days later, and three more rooms opened on June 18 at Bellagio, Caesars Palace, and Sahara. The Venetian was the first to announce a return to multi-table tournament action. The room will host two $250 buy-in no-limit hold’em shootout events, with one each on June 19 and June 20, with an eighty-player cap for the field and an 11:00 a.m. start time.
Live Poker Tournaments 2021
The events will have a maximum of five players per table, and will follow the shootout format that sees each table play down to a winner before moving on to the next round. The second round will shift to four-handed action, with the winners from those tables combining onto the final table of four to play down to a champion.
While these rooms and others around the country, and the world, have just begun to host live poker tournaments again, no major poker tours have yet announced the resumption of their publicly released schedules.
Live Poker Tournaments 2020
“I believe to have large scale multi-table tournaments [running again], the most important thing is that some restrictions have to be lifted,” said World Poker Tour Executive Tour Director Matt Savage. “Travel restrictions so that players can attend, capacity restrictions so that tournaments don’t have to be capped, and player per table restrictions so that tournaments can be played more than six-handed so that the properties that are open are fine with giving up cash games to run less profitable tournaments while maximizing attendance.”
Savage spoke to Card Player about the Coronavirus’ impact on the live tournament scene back in late April. In that discussion, he highlighted the most important factor for himself and other tournament organizers: the wellbeing of those involved in putting on and playing in potential events.
“The top priorities for us are to make sure that the players are safe and make sure our staff are safe,” said Savage.
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